


Repairs

by Pixel_Runner, Pixie Unger (Pixel_Runner)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Author is an adult and is not condoning underage drinking, Completely faking the science, Gen, I'm mercurial like that, Not Beta Read, Not even going to pretend any of this is plausable, Or not, Please Don't Hate Me, Please drink responsibly, Suspension Of Disbelief, no beta we publish our first drafts like men, tags to be updated, the dog dies, written while under the influence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:46:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24118996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixel_Runner/pseuds/Pixel_Runner, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixel_Runner/pseuds/Pixie%20Unger
Summary: Damned if I even know.I haven't really like most MCU stuff after TWS.But - Bucky took a lot of abuse in the fight scenes in The Winter Soldier.  Steve wound up in the hospital.  What happened to Bucky?  He would need medical attention too, plus his arm took a lot of hits and the widow bites couldn't have been good for the circuitry.  That was going to need repairs and maintenance and I don't buy it being a user serviceable part.  It wasn't like he could go back to Hydra for help with that.  So ... what's a boy to do?Find some back alley quack to sew him up and some morally flexible cybernetics specialist who was operating under the radar.Under appreciated scientist  - Does that just scream women in STEM fields?I don't know if this is going anywhere and I'm not aggressively tagging since I don't really want people to read it.  Comments make the writing go, so if you find it and you like it  - it isn't hard to talk me into writing an extra chapter or two.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 27





	1. Chapter Zero

The asset was aware of what he looked like. He looked like a scruffy version of the man in the picture. His last target was there too. The one he had been unable to kill.

And unable to let die.

He didn’t understand but it wasn’t required that he understand, only that he obey. His mission was over. He should return to his handlers. That was protocol. Unless he needed emergency medical attention while being unable to contact his handlers, in which case he was authorized to abduct a doctor. As long as there weren’t any witnesses.

He was not to surrender to an unauthorized base.

He looked down at his arm.

The weapon needed repairs.

He had memorized a list of authorized maintenance personnel.

The closest one was in the building that had fallen.

The next was at Camp Lehigh. He was at Camp Lehigh. The authorized maintenance personnel was located at the bottom of a crater. The others were in civilian custody.

He was not to surrender to an unauthorized base.

STRIKE Team was dead or in civilian custody. Pierce was dead. It was time to acquire unauthorized maintenance personnel.

The target most likely to be able to provide assistance was on the other side of the ocean. He had overheard the debate about whether she should be eliminated or recruited. She was added to the list for Project Insight. She was unauthorized but should be able to make the necessary repairs. She would be easy to eliminate, once she had completed the repairs.

He was not to surrender to an unauthorized base.

Unauthorized emergency service could be authorized as long as there were no witnesses and he reported to an authorized base once they were complete.

If a mission failed, he was to remain undetected but functional until he could report to an authorized user.

Repairs were required to maintain functionality.

There for his new mission was to remain undetected and maintain functionality via necessary repairs until he could report to an authorized user.

Time to acquire a plane.

\---

The woman’s dog had growled when they returned home to find him sitting in her kitchen. The dog had a cybernetic back leg. He watched her unblinkingly, assessing her panic when she startled then her distraction when she saw his arm.

She was not a threat and he did not threaten. He was what happened when threats failed.

He was not sure how to ask for her help. It turned out he didn’t need to. As soon as she noticed his arm, she noticed the damage and wanted to fix it.

He could recognize the lack of social skills. The Red Room would never have released someone like her into the world. Mind you, it had been thirty years since he was required to have social skills himself.

She doesn’t ask what happened or where he got the arm. She asks, “Can I fix it?”

He nods.

She pokes at it and makes sketches. He makes a note to burn them when he kills her. She makes them chicken lemon rice soup to eat. He eats with caution despite having watched her prepare it.

“Give me a couple of days to work on ths. Come back on Monday,” she says.

He nods and relocates to a town nearby.

On Monday, he finds that she has been taken.

It wasn’t difficult to find where she had been taken. The ones who took her were not prepared to defend against him.

They are not an authorized base, they are unauthorized witnesses and he has orders.

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

Hayley woke up with a whimper when he carefully did up the seatbelt to hold her in the back seat of the jeep.

“I’m gonna be sick,” was enough warning for him to get out of the way so she could lean out of the car.

He waited until she was finished to push her back inside and close the door. She sat there crying softly. He ignored it and drove off. 

When they were back on the highway and had merged into regular traffic, he asked, “Did you hit your head?”

“No, no,” she slurred. “I dint hit my head, they did that.” Then she frowned, trying to make sense of what she had just said.

He kept his eyes on the road and didn’t say anything. Twenty-seven kilometers later she added, “They killed my dog.”

“I saw.”

“They wanted the wiring harness. That was stupid. They can’t reuse it.” Hayley stopped to sniffle and wince, then wiped her nose on her left sleeve. “And they broke my arm.”

He grunted in acknowledgement.

“That was just so stupid. If they hadn’t broken my arm, I could have made a new wiring harness. They didn’t need to kill Serge.”

He didn’t say anything to that. In fact, he didn’t say anything for the next three hundred and forty-seven kilometers when he pulled onto a deserted road to change cars. The only warning she got before he moved her into the nex car was, “Try not to scream.”

She really did try.

She regained consciousness a few hours later as the mountains came into sight. “They took your parts.”

He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “I took them back.”

Now it was her turn to fall into a thoughtful silence. She didn’t ask who he was. She had never asked. She didn’t want to know. Until that moment she had thought that he was the reason she had been picked up, but the quiet malice in his voice suggested she was mistaken in the belief. It also suggested the people who had taken his parts were no longer in the land of the living.

She hadn’t signed up for that.

For any of this really. 

She had just wanted to build a cybernetic leg for her dog. She hadn’t done any original research, she had just read the studies that had already been published and extrapolated how that would work on a dog that had been hit by a car. She was a machinist with a little bit of backyard computer fabrication experience. She hadn’t expected it to work, to be honest. Then it did and she hadn’t done anything to publish or brag about what she had done. It wasn’t her research.

Like she had told that man when he had turned up on her doorstep, anyone who could read and tinker a little could have done what she did, it didn’t take special skill. 

He had commissioned her to rebuild his prosthetic anyway.

She had only grudgingly agreed to do the build. She firmly told him that he was going to need to find a real doctor to install it.

She had noticed him flinch when she said the word ‘doctor.’ After that she didn’t talk about the install, instead she had talked about never telling anyone she had any part of this.

He had assured her that wouldn’t be a problem.

She woke up when he had pulled her broken wrist straight, then she sobbed as he splinted it.

Neither of them suggested she go to a hospital, still Hayley felt the need to point out, “James? If we don’t stop for gatorade soon, I’m going to go into hypovolemic shock.”

### \-----

He didn’t stop for gatorade. He broke into a vet clinic. While she was drinking a bag of saline and trying not to gag, he nodded at the x-ray machine. “Do you know how to work one that?”

She paused and considered it. “No. But I bet the manual is around here somewhere. How hard could it be?”

Hayley read the user manual while the processor warmed up. There was a handy chart pinned to the wall listing how much radiation to use for different animals. She guessed that her forearm counted more like a dog leg even though it was bigger than that. James had suggested it was about the same size as a ferret. There was a brief discussion about how bone size mattered more than part size. 

He knew how to position her arm to get the views he wanted. He seemed satisfied with how her wrist had been set. Then he had her x-ray his back, chest and a lot of x-rays of his arm. They took the films when they left. James carefully cleaned up their mess and locked the door behind them.

This time, he buckled her into the front seat. “If we had taken the drugs to make your arm hurt less, they would have noticed.”

She snorted. “I have no idea what to take or how to use it.”

“I do.”

“Oh.” She thought about that some more. “I’m not going to be able to go home.”

“No. What do you need to be able to finish the maintenance on my arm?”

Hayley sighed, “I need to recover from my concussion first. Then we need to talk about bicycles.” He didn’t bite, but she continued anyway. “Back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth, companies made ‘all steel bicycles’ and promoted that like it was a feature.”

“I remember.”

That gave her some pause. “You remember?”

“They were heavy.”

“Right! But people still like them. They will talk about built to last and better frame geometry and go on and on about craftsmanship. The thing is - no one is riding a steel bicycle in the Tour de France. Racers want carbon framed bikes. Or whatever.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Whoever built your arm was really fond of steel. And not just the surgical steel for the implants. It is full of metal we could x-ray through. That isn’t light. I can build you parts, but really you need a whole new design. Honestly, the leg I built for my dog was better than that.

“You’ve got a metal collarbone and shoulder blade and some sort of ball joint in there. I have no idea what the outer housing is made of, I wouldn’t have thought an x-ray would make it through that. The inside is … crap, to be frank. It’s like some steampunk hipster built it. You have at least one vacuum tube in there for fuck’s sake.” Hayley stopped for breath. “It’s like whoever built that used a boy’s electronics kit from the 1960’s and then just kept adding on.”

“That sounds about right,” James admitted.

“The outside looks like -” she stopped for a moment, then started again. “I don’t want to sound like some crazy conspiracy theorist or anything, but did you ever see pictures that were smuggled out of Puente Antiguo?”

“No.”

“Look, I’m not a … I’m not qualified to install a new arm. How ever much I want to get a look at how they did the wiring harness, you’ve got a lot of stuff in there that I wouldn’t know how to deal with. Hell, there’s a whole chunk in the forearm that looks like a transistor radio.”

That made James pull over to the side of the road. “What?” he demanded.

“I know its stupid. Why would anyone put that in your arm? It’s not like they are tracking bears or wolves or-”

“Can you get it out?”

“Um… sure? But I don’t know what else it’s connected to and if I pull it out, you might lose functionality.”

“I removed the GPS.”

Hayley stopped talking then. She didn’t want to know why this guy would have a GPS chip in his arm. She waited for him to keep talking. He didn’t. “What now? I can’t start taking apart your arm with one hand - and my non dominant arm, I might add - while seriously concussed.” He just kept watching her. “Fine! If you can run the screwdriver, I’ll try to talk you through it.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hayley has to face up to some logistics she never wanted to have to consider.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New material in chapter 1

They stopped at some creepy ass abandoned hospital. It reminded Hayley of every horror movie she had never wanted to see. James had left her there with the x-rays. She wasn’t happy about that. She just wanted to sleep.

Her wrist fucking hurt, but her head hurt more. She was hungry and wanted to eat but was also nauseous with no appetite at the same time and the contradiction was just pissing her off.

James eventually came back with clean clothes and a case of water bottles. He helped her clean up a bit. She had caught a glimpse of reflection in the vet clinic, there was no way she was going to be able to go out in public and not be noticed. Not for weeks until all the bruises healed. 

“What are we doing?” she asked as she tried to brush her teeth with her left hand. This was round three and she was still cleaning dried blood out of her mouth.

“We are going to a safehouse. You are going to design me a new arm and machine the parts. One without the vacuum tubes.”

Hayley sighed. She was trying to figure out her chances of getting away from James and whether or not she would get picked up by law enforcement or just shot. “I still can’t install it.”

“Who installed your dog’s?”

“That’s different!” she protested.

“How?”

Hayley just gaped at him. “How is a dog different than a person? Are you joking? No one cared if the dog didn’t make it for one. No one besides me, anyway. Plus, I could get all the doggy drugs off the internet. And you already have a functional arm! Serge was down a leg and struggling to adapt.”

He didn’t say anything. He just kept watching her, with his resting murder face on.

She looked away. James scared her most of the time. She hadn’t really been happy when he had asked her to make some replacement servos and there was no discussion of surgery at that point.

“Finish getting cleaned up, we are going to a safe house.” 

The safe house turned out to be a dive apartment building in a sketchy part of a town that was a few days drive away from where she had started. They also appeared to have crossed an international border without Hayley knowing. That wasn’t comforting at all. Neither was watching James clean and rebuilt a ridiculous amount of heavy artillery that also shouldn’t have made it past customs. It was like the gun collection from a Rambo movie or something. She watched and she could see the movement in his left hand get stiffer and more clunky as he worked.

“You need to sleep.” It was said flatly without looking up from what he was doing.

“I need a bath,” Hayley thought. She wasn’t sure how that was going to work with only one hand and she wasn’t brave enough to ask James for help. He needed a bath even more than she did. And a hair wash and shave. However much she wanted - needed! - those things, James needed them more.

“How do you shower?”

It was the wrong thing to ask. James froze and his resting murder face got worse. She had no idea how he did it, but all signs of humanity left his face.

Hayley rushed through her wash, not really feeling clean at the end of it.

They slept in separate rooms. James screamed in his sleep, in at least five different languages. They didn’t stay in the city for long. Long enough for him to get a computer and download all her reference articles. He had a older model SUV stuffed to the gills with supplies when they left town. Hayley really hoped he had included shampoo in there somewhere.

Their next stop was a lodge in the mountains. James unpacked everything as Hayley sat on the porch. She grimaced as the pressure cooker went it. That didn’t bode well for him finding someone else to do the surgery. The last thing he said before he vanished into the woods was, “Don’t wander off, I’m putting down some mines.”

Hayley gritted her teeth at that and made chicken soup in the pressure cooker just to be obstinate.

\----

“I need a bath,” she announced after dinner. “And so do you,” she added after a moment. “And don’t look at me like that. I stink so bad I can’t stand it anymore and so do you.”

“So have a bath.”

“I can’t. I can’t wash my hair with only one hand. Last time I tried I got soap in my eyes and I’m sure I still have shampoo I couldn’t rinse out in there.”

He just watched her.

“I can’t believe I am saying this, but I need your help.”

There was no response. 

“C’mon! Between the two of us we have one pair of fully functional hands. You wash my hair and I’ll wash yours?”

“You don’t want to be naked in a room with me, doll.”

Hayley blinked. “Doll? Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“I’m not working on delicate electronics while dirty. That’s just asking for grime in the gears. And normally, that would be mixing metaphors, but in your case it’s true.”

As much as she wanted the bath, it was still really hard getting naked in front of James. Her amygdala was screaming at her to run the whole time he was close to her. When she had to lean back to rinse her hair her limbic system started to scream that he was going to waterboard her. She clenched both fists and concentrated on not screaming.

She got out of the tub, clean and in no rush to experience that again. 

But when she reached in to pull the plug, James stopped her. “My turn.”

“Yeah, just let me clean the tub first.”

“You aint that dirty. Probably just gave the water a bit of flavour is all.”

“Nope! Nope! No! Look! I left a ring! You need to get clean too, not just move your grime around so that it can see new places and make new friends.” He frowned at her. She hesitated, “Is there a shortage of hot water? Or is the septic system filling up or something?”

James shook his head.

“Then let me clean the tub and run some clean water.”

“Your heart rate was more than double your resting rate when I was washing your hair.”

“So?”

He didn’t say anything, but he turned and left the room. She heard the cabin door slam a moment later. Hayley cleaned the tub, brushed her hair as best as she could and washed the dishes. James wasn’t back before dark. There was only one bed in the loft upstairs. She found a blanket and wrapped up on the couch.

In the morning, there still wasn’t any sign of James. Hayley ate a granola bar for breakfast before turning on the computer, firing up AutoCAD and starting to make notes off of the x-rays. When she finally stood up to stretch out her back it was three pm, and James was standing silently in her blind spot watching her work. Hayley screamed.

James watched her with a sort of curiosity on his face. That was new. Normally he was T-1000 apathetic.

“You just scared the crap out of me!”

“Sleep upstairs, in the bed with a pillow under your arm to help keep the swelling down. You should be wearing a sling during the day so your hand is above your heart.”

“I don’t have a sling and you still need a bath,” she snapped.

“You should take my arm off first.”

“Why?”

“It will make it marginally harder to kill you by accident.”

Hayley wanted to laugh, she really did. James did not appear to be joking.

“OK.”

There was more of his arm intact than she would have guessed. He still had a stub with the distal quarter of his humerus in it. Or at least a metal structure in place of a humerus. The wiring harness in this case was actual wires. That was a lot more gruesome than the magsafe connectors Hayley had used on Serge. James was surprised when she sealed the ends of the wires with heat shrink so that they would short when wet. She wondered what kind of an asshole he thought she was if he expected her to not bother.

With his right hand and her left, they got his hair washed. He was surprisingly dexterous about getting dressed and undressed single handedly.

“What happens after I build your arm?” she asked.

He gave her a pointed look.

“You can’t kill me. You will still need someone to do maintenance on it.”

“One thing at a time.”

Hayley took a moment to really look at the insides of James’s previous arm. There were a few things that were easy enough to streamline and degunk before she reattached it. His knees buckled when it went live, but one it did, he immediately started recalibrating it. That was interesting to watch. He touched his thumb to each other finger tip, did a few full extensions and contractions of his fingers before some wrist circles and a shoulder roll that had all the internal workings fire up for a moment.

“You need to eat,” he said. Then he left again. Hayley wondered what the hell he was doing outside alone in the woods near the top of a mountain on his own.

She heated a microwave dinner and sat down to read the specs on the arm that she had downloaded while James was in the tub. “James?” she called.

“What?” he said from entirely too close to her.

“I’m going to need to learn how to program in fortran.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I need to switch to Steve for the next chapter. What do you think?


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little of Hayley's backstory.
> 
> Honestly, aside from a drunken, sprawling plot outline that all I wrote folks. Apparently, this was going to be Steve/Bucky deprogramming work with the next chapter from Bucky's POV as the Asset.
> 
> I don't even know.

“Get in, spanglepants.”

“Tony, I don’t have time to -”

“To what? Nat’s up on the hill, Fury is dead. Shield is gone. You’ve got no leads.”

Steve put his hands on his hips and back over at Wilson who was nearly caught up.

“You can bring your boyfriend next time. He’s going to want to talk to me about new wings anyway.”

Sam slowed to a stop and gave Stark a wave as he panted. Tony nodded, “Mr Wilson.”

“Sam -” Steve started to say.

Sam was bent forward, his hands bracing on his knees, but he nodded, “Gotta go?”

“Yeah.”

“OK, You do that. I’ll just finish my run at normal people speeds and not like someone with jetfuel for blood.” Sam straightened up, offered Steve his hand and pulled him in for a quick one arm hug. “Be safe, man.”

Steve nodded, “Drink some water.”

Sam rolled his eyes as Steve got into the car.

The door closed and the car pulled out into traffic.

“Shouldn’t you have your hands on the wheel?”

Tony was still looking at him, but Jarvis answered, “I’m driving today, Captain Rodgers. Sir is a bit distracted.”

“Are self driving cars legal?”

Tony said, “Yes,” even as Jarvis said, “No, but I have been driving Mr Stark since he was in his twenties.”

“You had a party without me,” Tony said. He was trying to keep his tone light but it wasn’t really working for him.

“I’m not sure I would call it a party.”

“That data dump you and Nat pulled? Jarvis has been working through it. He started out by looking for instances of the name Stark.” Tony stopped. “Jarvis, find a coffee place that isn’t Starbucks.”

“Sir, Ms Potts had enacted protocol CYP1A2, and instructed me to limit your caffeine intake at this time.” 

Tony gave a long suffering sigh.

“What did you find, Tony?”

“Hydra was interestingly keeping image files attached to tax code documents that when Jarvis used OCR to read had a list of Winter Soldier targets. The only reason you are even in this car is that he found it after I read up on exactly what they had done to your buddy there.”

Steve went very still, “What did you find out Tony?”

“He killed my mom, Steve. He caused the car accident, killed my parents and to take the version of Erskine’s formula the old man was working on.”

There was a moment of ringing silence. “I’m sorry, Tony.”

“Yeah, well, I read his file and it’s not like he had a choice.” Neither of them said anything until Jarvis pulled onto the I 95. “If you were anyone else, I would ask how strong is your stomach, but -” Tony gestured. The front car window became a display screen. “Before you ask, no, this isn’t legal either. What you are looking at is a packing plant in Symkaria. The guys are in the hazmat suits because the bodies weren’t exactly fresh when they found them. This is the sort of thing SHEILD would have been called in for, but it wouldn’t have made it onto the Avengers’ radar.”

As Steve watched the camera angle changed.

“This is surveillance footage of your buddy in action from two weeks ago. He comes in, he kills everyone, except for her.” As Tony talks the footage follows the Winter Soldier through the building. He opens a cell and looks at the woman unconscious on the floor, then closes the door and continues down the hall. “Do you want to watch the part where he tortures the scientists or can we skip that part?”

“What’s your point Tony?”

“After everyone else is dead, he goes back, drags her out of there. Loads her into his car and leaves with her. I got to wondering who she was.”

Steve just waited.

It was Jarvis who answered, “Ms Hayley Gerber, was a student at MIT fifteen years ago. She was required to discontinue after she accused one of her professors of publishing her work without naming her as a contributor. She had extensive paperwork to prove her case, but that was undermined but the professor explained that he had hired her to organize his notes. Interestingly, she didn’t claim the work itself, just that she had contributed.”

Tony waved a hand, “That isn’t really the interesting part.”

Steve could recognize that Tony was working his audience, so he played along, “What was the interesting part, Tony?”

“The interesting part is that the professor she accused was Dr Octavius, who got her deported when she lost her appeal with the academic conduct board.”

“You are telling me Bucky has captured an evil genius?”

Tony rolled his eyes, “He has a machinist who files her taxes on time and has never had so much as a parking ticket.”

“So why did Hyrda want her?”

“And we are back to the guys in the hazmat suits. Aside from all the dead people they are removing, they also found a dead dog with a cybernetic back leg and a microchip listing Hayley Gerber as his owner.”

Steve frowned, “You just said she was a machinist.”

“Yeah, I did. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“We gotta go find her!”

“Easy there Stars and Strikes. They have a two week head start. They could be anywhere by now. You’re the man with the plan, so stop for a moment and plan.”

\----

James wasn’t there very much. He would turn up every day or two to make sure she was still alive. She learned to ask for supplies as soon as she saw him. And not just normal supplies. She had to ask him about the laundry and point out that she couldn’t just wash her clothes in the sink with one hand. She had to remind him to bathe and she was pretty sure he wasn’t doing it if she didn’t ask.

She wondered if this was what having a kid was like.

A silent, scary kid who didn’t know how to be a person or what minimum standards of human behaviour were.

And she hated how happy she was to see him to have a break from being alone.

Her work space was the computer on a 1960’s dining room table with a kitchen chair to sit on. There was no internet. There was very little electricity. She spent a lot of time sleeping that first month. The rest of the time was taking notes on paper because the screen hurt her eyes and trying to learn a new programming language with a pounding headache. 

She worried that the beating had left her with brain damage. After a while, she started to wonder if James had brain damage too.

They had settled into a routine, once it became apparent that they both needed one. He turned up for dinner every night except for Saturday. He ate what she cooked, she insisted on that. He washed the dishes; she insisted on that too after she realized that kitchen cleaning was something that happened to other people in James’s world.

Aside from the food she cooked, he seemed to live entirely on protein shakes. Ate at the food she cooked grudgingly and at first she wondered if he thought she was trying to poison him. Then she picked up on him eating soups and stews better and she wondered if he had dental pain. Once she picked up on that, she switched to soft suppers and things went better.

After supper, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, she insisted he have a bath and wash his hair. She had reached the point where his glaring at her didn’t work. She wasn’t going to put up with the stink. Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, she had him help her wash her hair. Every night after supper, she had him brush his teeth. She honestly wasn’t sure if he would have done any self care if she didn’t tell him too. He didn’t fight her on any of it, but he did it like a man following orders he didn’t particularly understand.

She didn’t see James between Friday night and Sunday night. He would disappear for two days with the dirty laundry and a shopping list and come back with clean clothes and supplies. Sunday night was always hard. He came back looking wild eyed and scared and had to struggle to be human at supper. Monday was better. Tuesdays he was back to his regular dysfunctional self. 

Which is why she waited until Tuesday to tell him.

“I need a dog.”

He blinked and looked at her. She gave him a moment to understand. A lot of the time he needed time to translate what she was saying into whatever language he was hearing inside his skull.

She was expecting push back on that, but he just nodded.

Wednesday he asked, “Which leg do you want me to remove?”

“What?” she gasped. It had just come out of the blue. Until that point she wouldn’t have expected James to threaten her. She figured he would just kill her in her sleep. Or maybe his sleep, it was hard to say.

“Which leg,” he repeated slowly as if he was speaking to a child, “do you want me to remove so you can test an artificial leg on the dog?”

She blinked at him in horror. “None of them!”

He nodded and didn’t ask anymore questions that night.

Thursday, he asked, “What kind of dog?”

“A medium sized one.” Then she added, “One that won’t bite me.” After watching him for a moment, she added, “Can you adopt one from a shelter?”

He seemed to consider that. “I can steal one from a shelter,” he said cautiously.

“Close enough.”

Friday, she had everything she could think of needing for a dog on the grocery list.

Saturday morning she woke to the sound of the cabin door opening and closing. She hesitantly crept down the stairs and saw a dog watching James through the screen door. He was unloading a mountain of dog food onto the porch.

The dog had a choke chain and chain leash that Hayley immediately removed, but didn’t have any tags. “What’s her name?” she called through the door. James didn’t answer. “I need a webbing collar and leash too!”

He got back into this week’s SUV and drove off.

The dog was shaking, her tail between her legs. Hayley gave her a pat. “Hello, Lola. Let’s go see what the terminator got you for toys.”

  
  



End file.
